The CWIC Project: Developing and Using a Corpus for Intermediate Italian Students

Corpus consultation and advanced learners’ writing skills in French

“…However, we have found that students require considerable guidance if they are to benefit from corpus consultation, and a number of recent research publications focus on this area (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001;2002).…”

“…Published studies include quantitative research (Cobb, 1997;Bowker, 1998), qualitative research focusing on learner strategies and teacher guidance (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001;2002) and a longitudinal case study of learners (Turnbull & Burston, 1998). The aim of this study is to obtain information on the type of changes made by the learners in order to complement existing research and to assist us in presenting future guidance to students.…”

Corpora and Language Education

“…Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly, there are very few accounts in the literature which touch on the question of learner training, but see Sripicharn (2010). One writing programme which has integrated strategy training into writing work is Kennedy and Miceli's (2002) exploitation of a corpus of contemporary written Italian to aid students with personal writing on everyday topics. As students were struggling with corpus queries Kennedy and Miceli gave directions for corpus investigations through a series of leading questions.…”

“…For example O'Sullivan and describe how Master's students consulted a small semi-specialised corpus made up of two subcorpora, a 125,000-word corpus from Le Monde dealing with current issues relating to the French language and a 40,000-word corpus including text on the history and development of the French language, to improve their writing on a similar subject. Meanwhile, Kennedy and Miceli (2002) have built a 500,000-word corpus of contemporary written Italian, Contemporary Written Italian Corpus, CWIC, containing business letters, official e-mail messages and material from magazines, to aid students with personal writing on everyday topics. In a corpus study involving creative writing in Italian, Kennedy and Miceli (2010) describe their two-stage apprenticeship for inducting students into corpus consultation.…”

Concgramming: A computer driven approach to learning the phraseology of English

“…It supports this proposal by discussing replicable learning and teaching activities which enable learners and teachers to raise their awareness of patterns of phraseology. This study therefore builds on the work of others who have advocated the use of corpora and corpus linguistics in language learning in general (see for example, Aston, 1997;Bernadini, 2002;Braun, 2005;Kennedy &Miceli, 2002 andSinclair, 2004b) and the use of concordancing in particular (see for example, Bernadini, 2000; Cobb, 1997;Gaskell & Cobb, 2004;Johns, 1991;Sinclair, 2003 andStevens, 1991).…”